1999 Ch Pape Clement

1999 Ch Pape Clement (purchased for only SGD100 a few years back) over Peking duck and wagyu beef at Asia Grand to celebrate Monster’s success in the pool and his 11th birthday. This is showing much better than a similar bottle drunk 3-4 years ago. Crimson with a deep garnet core, from which arose a very inviting nose of predominantly red fruits, scorched earth, cedar and charred wood, matched to a strong but attractive barnyard note. Recognisably Pessac-Leognan. Medium-full, smooth and rounded, fleshy and succulent, discernibly structured, gaining in weight and intensity with further airing, producing good depth and grip with just a tinge of sweet tannins on the finish. 1999, supposedly a wet year (but actually not, apart from a single day of particularly heavy rain on 20th September just before the cabernet was harvested), was a vintage where Bernard Magrez’s preference for higher extraction worked in its favour, unlike an example of the 2000 where his style turned out to be far too extracted and tannic for my taste. This is drinking very very well now.